Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

  Annie was still alive, though critically injured. Walter Junior had also apparently survived the crash, an autopsy revealed later, only to be asphyxiated by flowers, his perfectly formed little nose and rosebud mouth stopped up with petals. Jeffrey was nowhere to be seen.

  Another search was instigated, one in which Walter himself now took part, having rushed to the scene, numb with disbelief, as soon as he’d been informed of the accident. Eventually, a policeman discovered little Jeffrey slumbering near the top of the ridge. He must have been thrown from the car as it tipped over, a fact that had surely saved his life. The infant boy was unharmed and completely oblivious, curled up on a dense cloud of pale pink primroses. Walter took him from the policeman’s arms and held him in hands streaked with blood from the pricking of thorns.

  He fixes his eyes on the apple in the painting’s foreground, the one cut in half. He concentrates on its yellowing insides, tinged brown round the edges, and scrutinises the glistening dots of black that make the pips. In turn, they regard him like the questioning faces of children. They interrogate him, these half-apples that will still be here when he is not.

  He takes some deep breaths. He will lose himself in the cut apple instead, as he lost himself in the faces of his two sons in the days and months following their birth. Today, these apple halves look very like the faces of his babies.

  During the week following the accident Walter had kept constant vigil at Annie’s bedside. He became fixated by the monitors and ventilating machines, trying to decipher in the code of their bleeps and clicks and whirrs the message that his wife would live. But Annie never woke up. When, on the seventh day, she was declared brain dead, Walter was advised to switch off her life support. He told the doctors he needed time to think and, for the first time since the accident, returned home.

  Once there, he went straight to little Jeffrey’s bedroom, took the sleepy boy from his bed and snuggled him against his chest. He smelled hot and sugary, like a fresh apple dumpling and was his poor father’s only hope left in life.

  He’d held Walter Junior in just the same way, when he’d gone to officially identify him and, as he’d placed his son gently back down on the mortuary slab, the sickening smell of dead flowers, from the petals mouldering in his throat and lungs, wafted from his lifeless body.

  Walter drove himself to the hospital the next day, trying to recapture something of what Annie had experienced on her last journey, the sense of being in control — of “determining my own movement through the world,” he remembered her saying. What good had that done? He became furious with her. What had she meant by ‘narrow existence?’ The selfish nature of her actions hit him hard. She had destroyed all their futures.

  Before he could enter Annie’s hospital suite he ordered that all the bouquets sent from well-wishers and family be removed and destroyed: “There will be no more flowers from now on,” he decreed, “not ever.”

  Then, in the presence of his lawyer, and supervised by two doctors, Walter had switched off the life support machine himself, and — he has never confessed this to anyone — he did it with anger in his heart.

  This anger has been the source of the most tremendous guilt, and driven so much of what is good and bad in his life.

  It spurred him on to expand his empire and he used its force to destroy those who got in his way.

  It was what led him to collect art — for her.

  It made him fund that movie — for her.

  It almost certainly poisoned his relationship with his only remaining child.

  In a flash of utter, breath-taking clarity he sees it caused his illness.

  The painting seems to sharpen and clear, all its perspectives forming a brilliant, coherent whole. “It all makes sense,” he says, and in that instant he knows exactly what he must do.

  There will be no more treatment. His… situation can be managed until the time comes.

  When all this is over — it will happen before the year is out — he will be buried in his family tomb, alongside the bodies of Annie and Walter Junior, interred now for twenty-three years. Those arrangements have already been made.

  The plan he is about to undertake will require the assistance and knowledge of very few people, people whose silence can easily be bought. Besides, hardly anyone knows he owns this painting.

  What he has just decided is that beside him, in his coffin — or perhaps lying on his chest with his arms around it — will be Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Jug, from which he cannot bear to be parted. He will present it to Annie in the afterlife, the gift he was never able to give her while she was still alive, as a peace offering, an admission that he was wrong.

  He must act without delay. Call his lawyer, immediately.

  He stands and, as he does so, the painting falls apart before him; the apples, the jug, the patterned tablecloth, all tip and swirl in front of his eyes.

  He is cold then hot then dizzy and puts one arm out to steady himself, but this time knows it will not pass.

  He thinks he will be sick after all.

  Nick, Liverpool — 2008

  He’s always liked the Walker’s bright, airy café with its large, round tables to share and the hubbub of people taking refreshment. That’s what you do in a place like this — refresh.

  At the counter, a woman arranges the display of cakes, flapjacks, wrapped sandwiches and biscuits. He won’t wait for Maria. “She’s late,” Nick says, taking a tray.

  “What was that, love?” the woman asks.

  “Oh, pot of tea for one please.”

  There’s a wire basket filled with fruit. They’ve got those waxy-shiny red apples that don’t taste of anything, and vivid green Granny Smiths with tiny brown freckles that are too sharp for him. There are Cox’s Orange Pippins. He repeats the name over and over, but only in his head.

  They look the most real to him — nicely squat, tiger-striped green and red over a light brown base — and he takes one in his hand. It is matt and grainily smooth, like the wooden bannister just now, leading down the stairs from the atrium. At the apple’s base, a nub has grown over itself, sticking out like his bellybutton. He’ll eat the apple and leave the core as evidence so Maria will see he didn’t wait, that his being hungry matters, doesn’t it, even though he isn’t that hungry.

  The woman who’s serving places a small stainless steel teapot on his tray, as well as a white cup and saucer, a teaspoon and a jug of milk. She pauses, then ducks below the counter and brings out a plate for the apple, along with a fruit knife, which she lays beside it.

  He pays and, when she gives him his change, she says, “Thanks, love. Enjoy.”

  He carries his tray over to the big round table directly under the atrium’s dome, the one next to the statue of the Roman soldier holding his sword up to the sky. A mum is already sitting there, spoon-feeding her kid from a jar. The table’s more than big enough, and he sits across from them.

  He steadies the apple on its plate and picks up the knife. Its black handle is lovely and smooth, better even than the banister, and fits well between his fingers. He examines the small, narrow blade closely, its dark, gunmetal grey reflecting the light in dimly abstract lozenges. Nice knives are hard to find. He’ll keep this one, slip it into his pocket before he goes.

  Nick cuts into the apple, feeling the give of the skin, the flesh, and then the modest resistance at the core where the pips are. As the apple halves fall away, the knife makes a sharp clang against the plate and it rings up into the atrium.

  He studies the delicate hoop, pale green and pretty, in the flesh that encircles the pips. The fresh perfection of this apple’s glistening insides, smelling of clean greenness, exists uniquely, right now and for a moment only, before it will begin to brown and ruin.

  He slices the half in half again, then cuts away the fibrous centre housing the pips and they drop out onto the plate. Once, when he’d swallowed some just like these, his dad had acted all worried and wide-eyed: “Awww, Nick! A tree’ll grow ou
t your stomach now, you know that?” Nick lay in bed every night for two weeks or more, anxiety growing into terror as he waited for a leafy branch to burst out through his bellybutton any minute.

  He places the knife back on the plate, careful not to make a noise this time, and bites into one apple wedge. Cool, sweet juice squirts from his mouth and trails down his chin. It’s delicious.

  Cox’s Orange Pippins were Jimmy’s favourite and that’s why Nick knows their name. Jimmy ate a lot of them, Nick remembers, the apples miniature balls of concentrated colour in his meaty hands. He could eat one in three vigorous bites chomp, chomp, chomp — all the bits spraying from his open mouth.

  Jimmy did everything this vigorously: his jarring, clear as a bell, whistling of tunes made up in his head; lathering his face with the badger-haired brush that Nick still uses for shaving; drying Nick with a rough towel after bath-time until he was red raw; striding down the street so quick that Nick had to run to keep up with him; fixing up three or four cars a day to earn enough cash in hand to go the pub most nights; crashing back home after Nick had been put to bed and screwing his mum whose noises woke Nick up and made him think she was dying. He’d be quietly amazed to find her next morning moving through the kitchen, making breakfast, apparently unharmed, while his dad was hunched over at the table with a strong instant coffee, trying to come round.

  A banging noise disturbs him. The baby opposite’s got hold of her plastic feeding spoon and is bashing the highchair with it. The mum’s tucking things away into her bag, oblivious.

  Nick lifts the metal lid of the teapot to give it a stir and snatches his fingers back. He’s scalded himself. Using the teaspoon, he flips the lid shut, blows on his tingling fingertips, the sensation one million millionth (what’s the word for that? A billionth? A trillionth?) of what Jimmy must have felt during his immolation — a word Nick learned shortly after his dad’s death by fire; one that he’s never forgotten.

  He can’t remember though if it always means throwing the body into fire. What’s the word for when you invite fire into the body? People who set fire to themselves, what’s the word for that? Going to the pub for the evening, drinking and chatting away, then sitting in your car after closing time, getting out of your car and opening the boot, taking the can of petrol that’s there and getting back in your car and locking it, pouring the petrol all over you before striking a match and burning yourself so vigorously, so fiercely, until all the oxygen inside the car is used up and then the car explodes, what’s the word for that?

  “Dad,” Nick says, and the woman across the table looks over at him. Dad is the word for that.

  He puts some milk in the cup, pours some malty brown tea on top and takes a gulp to wash the taste of apple away. It helps if he imagines his anger washing away too. How late is she now? He drains the cup of tea then pours some more and gulps that down too. It burns his throat. He can’t get away from Jimmy now. It’s that painting’s fault, the awful violence in it. He needs to think of something else.

  There’s a box of drawing implements and craft materials on one of the café tables. He jumps up and goes over to it, takes two sheets of paper, a couple of pencils and a rubber before returning purposefully to his seat. He pushes his tray back, clearing some space, places one piece of paper on top of the other, lining up their edges carefully, then puts the milk jug to one side of the tray and positions the teapot at the back so it reflects everything in its curves.

  When they used to draw their still lifes in art class Paddy would choose objects especially to make contrasts between surface textures. Nick could manage the intricate shading needed for a gnarled piece of wood, for example, but put something smooth and shiny in front of him and he could never get the shape of the distorted reflections right, or the quality of the light bouncing off it.

  “You don’t have to reproduce what you see exactly,” Paddy said to him one time, after he’d thrown his pencil across the room in frustration. “You’re not a machine, lad.”

  Back then, when he knew no better, Nick thought Paddy was talking a load of old shite when he talked about interpreting the relations between objects, the light that existed in the spaces around them, and he’d said so. “You have to draw it like it is,” he’d back-answered, “otherwise it’s a failure.”

  Paddy had just sighed at him: “Go and find that pencil, Nicholas. Then get on with your work.”

  Nick got sick for the first time not long after that and never finished his coursework, or took his last exam, but at least Paddy never ran out of patience with him.

  He places the knife on a decisive diagonal, the blade pointing away from him. He wants to stand the half apple so that it faces directly out at him, but it won’t stay upright so tries propping it with the teaspoon, but it’s awkward and, anyway, he wants the spoon in the picture. The apple’s inside has already started to brown. That’s what happens when you expose things to the air. He needs to get a move on.

  Nick goes back to the box of materials and fishes out a blob of plasticene, warms it in his hands, then squishes it onto the centre of the plate. He presses the apple firmly into it. It feels good, certain, this positioning of an apple on a plate, and might be the best thing he does today.

  Panning across the tray’s contents, he assesses the shapes and their relations, gauging the spaces between the objects and their points of overlap, hearing Paddy’s guiding words. He’s never understood why this isn’t easier for him. “Make your hand an extension of your eye, Nicholas,” Paddy is saying “then forget what your eye can see. Let your hand take over.” Paddy is haunting him today as much as Jimmy. Nick does as he’s told, and begins to sketch an outline of the whole arrangement.

  For his eighth birthday, Nick’s mum had bought him a drawing machine; a hinged wooden lattice that you pinned on top of a board with paper on it. In one end you slotted a pencil and, at the other, there was a pointed rod with which to trace over the image you wanted to reproduce. The pencil drew it for you, larger, on the blank piece of paper. He spent hours ripping pictures out of magazines, his mum’s catalogues, newspapers, to copy. His bigger versions were always a bit wobbly, skewed, but he easily compensated for that with his expert colouring in.

  He’d made the mistake of leaving the drawing machine out on the living room floor one night, tripping Jimmy up when he came in from the pub. He’d flung it against the wall and, when Nick wailed at him about it the next morning, Jimmy flung him against the wall too.

  With a softer pencil, he fills in details; the pattern running down the centre of the half apple, the teacup’s square handle and the beautiful simplicity of the fruit knife, balanced across the plate, its blade the colour of a shark. He won’t bother yet with the things he can’t manage — the dull reflective shine on the stainless steel, the scummy surface of the tea, the placid pool of milk in the jug, the complicated bending of light in the teaspoon’s little bowl — but he has surprised himself by managing to create the apple shapes truthfully.

  He leaves the faint, trailed lines he has used to make the pattern of the apple’s core as they are — to add anything would ruin it. It still has its pips, three of them, dark as bitter chocolate. One hangs half out of its little pocket and could drop any minute. He works to get its shape and angle right, the tension it represents, then sits back, blows out a mouthful of air. He has not ruined it.

  If he’s drawing when Maria gets here, it’ll prove he didn’t waste his time doing nothing, waiting for her. Him drawing might make her worry. He wants her to worry. No, he’s being unfair. This job was a great chance for her. She’s been unhappy for a while. And if she’s happy again then they might get back together.

  He brings his attention to the knife, goes over the outline of the handle, trying to get the gentle feel of the wood and the flush metal strip and little rivets exactly right. But the blade is proving hard to get. He can’t recreate its sharpness, something that isn’t a quality of the blade itself, but is once more about those things Paddy talked about
and which he has always struggled with; how the objects around each other affect each other, how each defines its own, occupied, space.

  Nick leans in to see how he looks in the blade, to find out what might be reflected of him in it, and an image flashes into his mind, of him picking up the knife and slashing himself across the forearm. It’s a cold blue image that makes him shiver and he grips the pencil tight, which is not a knife, he tells himself, not a knife.

  He draws two quick lines in an attack on the paper, unthinkingly, and there now is the blade, as good as he can make it. He starts shading it in, loves the blade’s shark sheen, its smoky grey, abstracted reflection of the atrium.

  This is better. It’s all good.

  Jeffrey, Hong Kong — 2013

  “Off!” snaps Jeffrey, and the screens all blacken and crackle with static. He doesn’t want to watch his father puking again, but, gazing blankly ahead, he sees him anyway in their reflective surface, the scene playing out as it has done many times before: Walter leaning over the bathroom sink, spattering green-brown bile; the doctor hovering patiently behind him with a towel; Walter sinking to the floor, gulping for air; the doctor wiping Walter’s mouth and all but carrying him to the bed where he curls up and holds himself, whimpering, waiting for the nausea to subside.

  The kick Jeffrey got out of watching the great Walter Yeung’s deterioration had worn off pretty quickly and his first idea — filming the private moments of sickness and vulnerability, then anonymously releasing the footage online thereby bringing about a grand public humiliation — had faded after the first few recordings. Jeffrey has wished for Walter’s death many times, but only in the abstract. Now, when it’s becoming real, when it’s truly set to happen, he’s — what? — scared, that’s what.

  “It should be me,” Jeffrey whispers. It should be Jeffrey’s hand resting on his father’s arm, holding water to his lips and wiping his dribbling mouth, as Walter must have done for him at times when he was a child, though Jeffrey can’t remember it. But it’s not him. The doctor is playing that role.